By Xiong Xing
October 25, 2025 marks a day of special historical significance. On October 25, 1945, Taiwan, after suffering from Japanese colonial rule for half a century, was restored to China. The restoration of Taiwan is not only an important part of the great victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, but also a historical memory and a national glory shared by all the Chinese people.
The restoration of Taiwan is a historical memory forged by blood and tears. The Japanese colonizers carried out "the Kominka Movement" in Taiwan by means of economic plunder, cultural assimilation, and political oppression, intending to suppress the national consciousness and Chinese cultural identity of compatriots in Taiwan. In the face of the cruel rule of the Japanese colonizers, Taiwan compatriots had never ceased resistance. From the initial armed struggle against Japanese aggression to the subsequent cultural resistance, all efforts demonstrated the indomitable patriotic spirit of the Chinese nation. The restoration of Taiwan is the victory achieved by the Chinese people through 14 years of arduous struggles and at the cost of huge national sacrifice, and is recognized by the international community as China's just act of taking back its lost territory.
However, at a time when we should have deeply remembered history and paid tribute to the martyrs, the Lai Ching-te authorities still insist on "toadying to Japan". After the right-wing Japanese politician, Sanae Takaichi, was elected as the Prime Minister of Japan, Lai Ching-te congratulated her in Japanese on his social media account, which represented by no means a simple courtesy greeting, but once more exposed the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities' long-pursued course of "pro-Japan, anti-China" and seeking "Taiwan independence" through external support.
As one of the notorious right-wing politicians in Japan, Sanae Takaichi has been repeatedly advocating the history of Japanese militarist aggression, let alone her recurrent visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. Lai Ching-te's act of flattering such an individual is no different from "kneeling" to the Japanese colonizers who had brutally oppressed the people of Taiwan, and constitutes a blatant betrayal of history and a desecration of the great spirit of resisting Japanese aggression demonstrated by Taiwan's predecessors.
The DPP authorities have long regarded external forces including Japan as the so-called "support" to seek "Taiwan independence" and counter the Chinese mainland. The fact that Lai Ching-te could not wait to "toady to" Sanae Takaichi demonstrates his mindset of counting on external forces to drag on the precarious illusion of "Taiwan independence" through strengthening collusion with the right-wing forces in Japan.
Out of their narrow political interests, the DPP authorities are eager to flatter and grovel to the descendants of the colonizers. The stance of "toadying to Japan" aligns with their deeds of suppressing Chinese culture and pushing "de-Sinicization" in Taiwan, all aiming to sever the historical and cultural ties between Taiwan and its motherland and pave the way for a illusive "Taiwan independence" identity.
The restoration of Taiwan shows that Taiwan's future has always been closely connected to that of its motherland, and China's national reunification and rejuvenation form the historical trends that no force can stop. The international community generally abides by the one-China principle. The DPP authorities' obsession with "Taiwan independence" and strategy of relying on external forces is against the tide of history and leads nowhere. Lai Ching-te's clumsy performance of "toadying to Japan" is no more than an absurd attempt to stop the mighty tide with a hopeless struggle, which will neither change the fact that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, nor reverse the great progress of China's national reunification and rejuvenation shared by compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
(The author is a contract research fellow of the Research Center for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait and assistant to the director of the Institute of Regional and International Studies, Hubei University)
Editor's Note: Originally published on china.com.cn, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.